Apotheosis: Vox Populi
by TrisakAminawn
Summary: A series of testimonials from the years between the secret death of L and the appearance of M and N on the playing field. Considering what kind of world Light had built with his power. Tell us, everyone: Is Kira God?
1. Omniscience

**(1) **

Kira is not God. Aaron was innocent.

They framed him, and they put the frame-up on TV, and Kira saw it and killed him, even though we _showed_ them at his trial that it wasn't him, even though the jury was almost to the point where they believed us because the cops found one fingerprint from those guys and those guys said they were never there…Kira didn't care.

Kira killed him. Before my eyes, as he left the witness stand after testifying on his own behalf, Kira ripped his life out of his chest like a hungry demon and he fell down and down the steps and landed with his neck twisted under him and his arms and legs all tossed about like a monstrous puppet's. And all the cops there never tried to investigate or anything. They just cleared his body away and gave it back to us later. Aaron! To have seen the person you love die in such a way, before a crowd of people, and have the death not matter to anyone.

After that, no one said Aaron was innocent anymore. Not even our staunchest supporters would say that where anyone else could hear them. Jury members said as they left that it was too bad that he'd been guilty after all.

A God would have known. A God would have cared.

We gather now, the ones Kira has left with nothing, we innocents who have watched our innocents be snuffed out without recourse, we gather in darkness, in secret, that no one may hear us, as though we were the wickedest of plotters, and we mourn them, we curse him, curse that name, curse him for being only a name, for if we knew who he was we would die cursing him to his face, if no more. For you, Aaron, for the meaningless death he gave you, I would consider such a death to mean the world. If they ever catch him, we will go to the prison where they put him and we will stay there, hating him and making him feel the hatred we have had to hide all this time, our loathing and our scorn, until they take him to be executed, or until some other angry victim sets bombs and blows to the furthest reaches of hell the prison, and us, and him.

That devil.

* * *

><p><strong>(2)<strong>

Kira is God.

So he purifies us and makes us clean in the blood of the lamb. One day soon all will be pure, and we will begin a new age of godliness, and he who is now known to the world as Kira will step forward into the light and we will know him for our Lord.

Until then I provide him with the faces of the sinful. The newspapers and the heretics who run them accepted the demon L's request to abandon their ordained task of revealing the guilty, but it does not matter because Kira has us, his faithful, and we will never hesitate. He stays his holy hand until mankind itself denounces the sinner or the sinner speaks against God himself, testing our spirit of submission. We will never hesitate. We will never rest. We are everywhere. We see all. We will offer up the polluted ones until mankind is cleansed and the time of Kira is at hand.

* * *

><p><strong>(3)<strong>

Being in the public eye is dangerous in a way it never was before. You have to walk a narrow line, if you're anything like me, between things you can't say and stay alive, and things you just _can't_ say. Without choking on bile. Most media personalities are understanding, given we're all in the same trap even more hours per day than other public figures, and don't ask questions that could put one another on the spot. It's the new etiquette. Everyone remembers Koki Tanabata.

We respect her. She's a hero. But she's also dead.

Some people break the new rules, though, just for a big moment, especially the Kira supporters who have nothing to fear, and then you have to get through the moment without dooming yourself or betraying your convictions. I come closer to the second one every time.

After all, there's nowhere you can go to escape Kira. Not really. Sooner or later I expect I'll give in and say that he is good.

* * *

><p>Kira's position on the world stage during the time skip has to have been more complicated than we were shown, only partly because Light had effectively muzzled dissent with the threat of death. We got the loud collaborators, but presumably there were plenty of silent dissenters, and a spectrum of understanding on the issue. This will be a series of drabble-ish public opinion pieces on the theme of 'Kira is God.' All reviews enthusiastically accepted.<p> 


	2. Omniprescence

**(4)**

I don't care if Kira is God, though my daddy would. I figure he ain't no such thing, though. Cuz...almost half the cops've stopped seriously trying to bring people in for anything short of rape or manslaughter, cuz they never know when Kira'll decide to kill purse-snatchers today and they don't want that on their souls. I figure if Kira was God he'd of done something about them by now. Officer Malley caught me moving weed for Dennis last week and he gave me half a dozen whacks but didn't write anything down. Ought to be police brutality, but I known the man to nod to long enough to say it was kindness.

I mean, I'm not saying I wouldn't rather _not_ got hit, but I coulda stopped him, and then he'd of had to call backup, and then it'd be in the system. Kira thinks drug dealing is _real_ evil. Malley and me, we had a whole head-to-head moment, him all 'I have to do my duty but I don't wanna get you killed' and me like 'okay, whatever.' And we got away with it.

Not ratting each other out is a longtime thing. It's what you do. So it's weird, how our cops-not-to-rat-to are getting together not to rat us out to Kira.

I think there's going to be murder done in the department before long, cuz the guys who don't mind Kira know the other guys are covering up, and they're mad.

Wonder if Kira thinks his guys killing other guys for him is still murder.

Hope it's not Malley who goes down.

* * *

><p><strong>(5)<strong>

Kira is the Devil. Viz, his first day was the Number of the Beast, viz, he is Lord of this World even as it was said the Accuser should be, viz, the Secret-Never-to-be-Told, wherein the Devil goes out of his way to bring the souls he owns to him as quick as he can. Viz, Armageddon is coming, and the ungodly are being summoned to arms amid the flame. the better to shatter the spirits of the living. Wherefore, the Lord in his wisdom has allowed this, for those that now bow before the power of the Devil were destined always to be lost, for though we walk in the valley of the shadow of death we must fear no evil.

But though he marshals all the hordes of wickedness and brings all cowardice to its knees before his throne we faithful will not be swayed, and beside the ranks of angels we few will prevail. Too young is my ministry to quit this world, so carefully I speak and spread the good Word, for I will not give it to the Devil to send me to the Lord.

* * *

><p><strong>(6)<strong>

I know Kira isn't God. I don't know what he is, who he is; I don't know anything. But he can't really be God, even though I say he is. It's not because I think God has to be kinder or fairer or just…better somehow, though I do think that sometimes. It's just that if it were God, there'd be something _more_. Bad guys who don't get tracked down by the police first. A plague of something. A message in light. A proper prophet, not that flake from Sakura News, even if I cheer along with everybody else when he stands up and does his flaky thing. Something.

Grandma would have said I was an idolater and going to Hell. And maybe I am. I'm just…so afraid. It might be costing me my soul, but I…I just wanted to be on the winning side. I wanted to be safe. I've started throwing up practically everything I eat. My throat hurts all the time and I suck mints so my clients don't smell the vomit on me.

The more I say I believe in Kira, the less I believe in anything at all.

* * *

><p>AN: I think the last one on this page is one of my favorites. I think this is two men and a woman, but the all-concealing-I means you can shuffle that as you like, if you like. Please review! New chapter every three reviews. Promise.


	3. Theodicy

**(7)**

Kira is God, and I am his mintister. Nobody undertsands what I'm trying to acompplish, but he would. I will always be there for him when he is ready to offer us his speach, and I will not let the hertics' voices overwelm the truth. There are others who feed him the names nad the faces that the hertic L took from the news, but only I watch so well and so faithfully for the evil ones. I have done away with twenty-four hertics now, but people have stopped telling strangers their names, so it takes more cuning all the time to take the phone picture and give it the right name and a crime as bad as their words aginst Kira, for perpsective. But we will never be stopped. God is great. We will all be rewarded, and I will stand high as a faithful minitser vigilant aginst evil.

* * *

><p><strong>(8)<strong>

Only the most untutored of heathens could take this Kira killer for God. The Almighty is merciful and beneficent, and He knows His own law. Only the worldly masses, or idolatrous Orientals, could believe that the hand of God would move against those who break the trivial laws of man, and ignore true perversions of justice and the Word. Secularism clearly breeds rampant superstition. Whatever man—or demon, though I don't usually believe in the hand of the Enemy working so openly—is behind all that excessive death, that even the laws of man never demanded, has damned himself by hubris to a much deeper hell than mere unbelief ever earned him, with all his violence and presumption. The Lord of the Worlds does not suffer pretenders or false prophets to prosper.

God will destroy Kira. It's only a matter of time.

Let us pray.

* * *

><p><strong>(9)<strong>

Kira is God. I believe in him. Mom says he killed the man who killed her sister, she was dancing today all around the kitchen because she heard. I said I thought that man was in jail already, and she said he was, but that was always too good for a person like him.

Kira is God. He wants to make the world a better place for people like Mom and me. And Kira can't die for us because this is the part where he's sending plagues to the ungodly, and he can't die during that part, or let the Egyptians catch him the way the Jews let them, but I bet he's crying, Kira. I bet it hurts him to have to kill all these people. Anybody would cry. But for us, he's doing it, and that's how I know he's God. That he would go that far for us.

I'll follow him forever. Kira, our Savior.

* * *

><p><em>Not particularly intending the girl to be the one from the vigil; she's probably a bit too young. Sorry about the first guy's inability to spell. You know the type, though.<em>

_There's been a tendency to Christian and Christian-flavored terminology here, partly because English is a language whose religious vocabulary grew up about the church and partly because between geography and modern evangelical patterns, the majority of persons taking an interest in this question probably would be from a Christian milieu. After all, to a pandeist 'is Kira God?' is barely a coherent question, let alone a relevant one.  
><em>

_Please review!_


	4. Omnipotence

**(10) omnipotence**

As if a God would watch the news. I'm prejudiced, of course, since I don't believe in the first place, but even I can tell the power's too little. Maybe a god, small G, would watch the news, even learn things from it—half the time gods are just humans writ large, with lots of power, after all, but even a small-G god should have more than the ability to kill, and more than the ability to kill only one person at a time, and be able to handle a better grade of justice than performing capital punishment on people whose crimes have already been made public.

Plus, I saw videos of the Kanto, Japan broadcast, online. He got _duped_. Kira's just a psychotic psychic. _If _he's not a secret organization that's either formed as a conspiracy among the world's police forces or has moles everywhere, and the second doesn't fit with the broadcast, because if they had moles good enough to take that guy out while he was still on television they would have also known he was a fake, and not bothered, unless to convince the detective or the public that Kira was in Tokyo. Possible, but unlikely. L and his psychic Japanese mastermind could be all a front, of course. You never know with governments. But on the whole I doubt this level of cooperation is possible, especially when I can't see where the money would be.

No, on the whole I guess Kira is one or two small-minded, crazy humans with psychic abilities. Or, hah, I guess Kira could be what the real world gets instead of Clark Kent when we naturalize super-powered aliens. Can't be a cadre of assassins who've been hired to scare the peoples of the world into submission, because then they'd tend toward killing the kind of people that the public would be upset to lose. Right? Because this way, people aren't getting upset, exactly. They're getting dead-eyed and inured to death (because it's starting to seem like everyone's seen someone die) and light and bitter about life, and heavy and bitter about living.

And meanwhile the Japanese, since they and the world believe he's one of their own, have spun off the deep end. They're not the craziest people in the world for their cartoons and game shows and sneaker adds anymore. But the same madness is at the backs of everyone's eyes. Everywhere.

It's scary. This world. I treat it like a joke, like someone else's problem, but seriously, right now when it's one-forty-five AM, eastern standard time, and I'm alone in my apartment, it's suddenly struck me that I am scared shitless, and there's nothing I can do about it but hold on tight.

Which is just the world as usual. But missiles, famine, pollution, disease, slavery, corruption, and ordinary death were never like this. They were parts of life. But this is anti-life, Kira, like a hole in the world where the _vivre_ is draining out. This world was always a little bit like hell, but Kira's taken away so much of what wasn't. Although...it's just another fear. Maybe it only seems so huge to me because it's a fear and evil that's at its strongest here in the rich and civilized world, where it's supposed to be safe, where until now we had forced most of the usual fears far away, into death, and the dark corners you can usually avoid, and into countries less lucky and complacent. He can strike at our hearts. Our personal demon. A mad little boy with an internet connection and morals about as deep as a nineteen-fifties comic book. Speak, and you might die. Join him, and you might live. Keep all your secrets close. His spies tell him everything. He could do anything.

And I can do nothing about it.


End file.
